


Afterimage

by galacticproportions



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bodhi Lives, Emotional Manipulation, Everyone else dies, Grief, M/M, Survivor Guilt, consolation sex, sex with strangers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-06
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-15 05:12:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9220142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/galacticproportions/pseuds/galacticproportions
Summary: Bodhi makes it off Scarif. But he doesn't think he should have.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [leupagus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/leupagus/gifts), [peradi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/peradi/gifts).



> If there was a shirt that said BODHI ROOK DESERVED BETTER, I would wear it. However, "better" is not what I gave him in this story, exactly. Maybe a little. 
> 
> This is for peradi, whose "Hope Lives On" gave Bodhi a different kind of afterlife, and for leupagus, because something something rarepair involving Luke Skywalker, but really because both of you have given me a lot of enjoyment with your stories. I hope this gives a little back to you.
> 
> ETA: That Luke Skywalker feels extra warm to certain people is all leupagus, all the time. If you haven't read "To the Sky Without Wings," well, it's the weekend, so unless you're working weekend shifts or are otherwise unable at this time to Feel All The Feelings, go forth and be destroyed.

When Bodhi sees the cylinder rolling toward him, at first he doesn't know what it is, and then he does. He _moves,_ scrambling like a thu-spider, forward, forward, _out,_ flinging the thing sidearm out onto the beach. It hits and blows, sending up a fountain of sand and dead men.

Standing panting in the shuttle hatch, he sees Chirrut fall, sees Baze run to hold him; sees the other rebels, men whose names he never got to learn, firing and falling, firing and falling. Sees on the sand the shadows of Empire and Alliance craft engaging, sees parts of the signal tower crack and break away—will it stop the transmission?--and sees, too, the beam of light descend from the sky, like sun through a break in the clouds. But there are no clouds, and even though Bodhi was locked in jail and lost in darkness and never saw the Death Star strike his city, he knows what this is.

“Baze,” he calls desperately, knowing Baze won't hear him. He tries the comm, but there's static where Melshy was. Baze fires and fires and fires and falls. Bodhi beckons, waving his arms, calling to anyone who can hear him, “Fall back, fall back, _please,”_ and three of them do, they hear him and come stumbling. “Get in,” he says. “We're taking off.”

“But Cassian--” Cassian's the one they know, the one who, as far as they're concerned, brought them here.

“No time,” Bodhi says, and powers up the engines.

 

*

 

The debrief lasts hours: not just what happened on Scarif but everything he knows about the Death Star, anything to augment the information that Jyn and Cassian and Baze and Chirrut and K-2SO died for. That he should have died for. No one says it, but he can hear it in their vowels, see it hovering on the edges of their lips. _Why were you the one who made it out, you, the one with Imperial ties? If you made it, why didn't they?_ Bodhi expects it, deserves it, welcomes it, agrees with it. He tells them everything he can, until finally he runs dry and they send him off to a dead man's bed.

And it's in the small hours of that morning that the base comes alive with horror, stumbling and dragging each other into the situation room, standing red-eyed and sleepless and speechless over the coded dispatch from the Core. Alderaan. A _planet._ Not just a city, an entire—

Bodhi goes away for a little while.

He comes to with a canteen nudging his lips and Adnan, who came with him off Scarif, holding the other end of it. “Drink some water,” Adnan says. “We're still alive, and if you're alive you can fight.”

“I helped them build that,” Bodhi whispers. “I helped them _build_ it, I should be dead, I should be--”

“Should I be dead?”

Bodhi is so surprised he drinks some of the water.

“You didn't have to get me and Ubi and Rocks off that fuckin' sand,” Adnan says. “You didn't even have to come here with that message. You did, though, so now we're here, and like I said, if we're here we can fight, and we're _gonna_ fight. Drink the rest of this, there's plenty.” He pats Bodhi's shoulder, a kind of sideways thump, and leaves the canteen propped against Bodhi's thigh.

It's the last time anybody touches him, or he touches anybody, for a long while.

They put him on transport duty. It makes sense: he's not trained for combat, and he's good at landing and handling crafts that are built like a bantha with wings. It means he's hauling materiel again sometimes, sometimes personnel. He transports a platoon of Pathfinders, led by a slab of rock who calls himself Kes Dameron and plays speed-sabaac with Bodhi while they're in the hyperlanes; he drops a team of agents on Ord Mantell and brings a much smaller team back. A few people in every group are Alderaanian, and their faces look how his feels. He wants to reach out to them, but doesn't know how, so they pass each other, locked in their homelessness, their orphaning.

Bodhi feels like he's been widowed many times, even though he barely knew them—Baze and Chirrut and their deep sufficiency to one another, K-2 who shouldn't even have been possible but was, Jyn with her late-blooming hope, sharp Cassian whose face Bodhi would have liked to touch and see if it could soften. No time, no time. Send them off with Galen, with his mothers and Rohini, with his city. More names to call silently into the darkness.

Sometimes he carries refugees, people fleeing Imperial expansion, and perversely, he likes those flights the best. He gets good at helping them be as comfortable as possible, acknowledging their disassociation and their consternation, not talking too much or making demands. There's often an undercover Alliance officer on those missions with him to suss out potential recruits and infiltrators, and watching them be kind and warm and sympathetic to a stone-faced woman with one arm around her dazed elderly father and the other clamped tightly around her midsection makes Bodhi's own stomach turn over, though it's hard for him to say why.

He's on one such run when the squadrons move to act on on the plans that he and Jyn and Cassian sent out into the void, so he doesn't see the Death Star blow, but when he hears the news he closes his eyes and sees the explosion printed there on the darkness. He feels a savage joy, which surprises him partly because it's a feeling at all. _There's your funeral pyre, Galen. There's the fire to send you into the Force, to free you._

 

*

 

If Bodhi's hate for it were heat, Hoth would melt and then there wouldn't be a problem. Hoth is even worse than Eadu, in the sense that snow is worse than rain and ice is worse than water. Bodhi didn't know it was possible to be this cold and live. He's not sure living is even what he'd call it, the dim short days and the long black nights, the cold fluorescents rigged in the tunnels, the furtive offworld strikes and supply missions, the return to beds that are literally freezing.

He does notice that when Luke's around, the caverns seem a degree or two warmer and brighter, as though that blond head of his were still reflecting back the desert sun. Bodhi's heard of Luke Skywalker, of course—everyone knows about the flying ace from nowhere, the kid who took out the Death Star—but this is the first time they've been in the same place. And unlike most of the Rebellion, whose suspicion of Bodhi either never ended or shaded into a kind of grudging utilitarian acceptance and got stuck there, Luke seems to want to know him. Comes and talks to him in the hangar, sits down with him over rations, brings him messages from Command. He asks questions about the Rogue One team—respectfully, but he asks—and when it comes time to name their new squadron Luke's the one who makes the suggestion. Bodhi never would have thought to bring it up, and he's surprised how much it touches him when approval for the name is nearly unanimous.

He supposes that Luke is looking for a hero and has settled on the only one left alive. The simpler explanation doesn't occur to him until Luke sits down very close on a crate in the hanger, his thigh jammed up against Bodhi's, and says in a determined tone, “You seem cold. I could warm you.”

Bodhi would laugh, he almost does laugh—at the terrible line and its contrast with Luke's tone, at his own failure to realize until now what was happening—but his thigh where Luke's thigh touches it really is warmer. Much warmer. Warmer than he would have thought was possible, given the cold air and the layers of clothing between it and them. Between them.

He says, “Do you wanna go somewhere?”

They end up on one of the bench-bunks in a transporter that's up on blocks for repairs, Bodhi sitting while Luke kneels between his legs, just as eager and exaggerated as he is in all his motions outside an X-Wing. Bodhi comes and comes into Luke's mouth, into _real_ heat, head banging back against the durasteel wall because this feels so good. Luke sucks and licks and pulls off, mouth puffy and shining. They're both mostly clothed but Bodhi longs to get his hands inside Luke's shirt, not even for warmth, just to touch. He wonders if anyone heard his head knocking against the wall—from outside it'd be just a faint sound. “What do you want, though, what can I do for you?”

“I don't need anything right now,” Luke says. “I just wanted to make you feel good.”

“Come on, man, that's ridiculous. Let me do you with my hand at least. Or you do it. Look at me and do it.” That's what he and his friends would do when they were thirteen, in a little corner between the inner and outer walls of the temple, between prayers, not ready yet to touch a whole other person.

“Too far away,” Luke says, “I promised to get you warm, I just remembered,” and before Bodhi can say anything Luke's stripping, he must be _insane,_ he's saying, “You gotta get naked too or it won't work.”

“Fucking hell,” Bodhi mutters. He hasn't sworn in—how long? He can't remember. Why does it feel good? Why does Luke's bare chest against his, nipples hard in the cold air, feel so _right here,_ so _right now?_ Luke kisses him, bites along his jawline, says, “Lie down, I wanna rub off on you,” and he spreads his jacket on the bench so that Bodhi will lie softer.

Bodhi comes again just after Luke does, that warm lean weight on him like a blanket.

 

*

It isn't love.

Bodhi doesn't think he'll get to feel love again, not that kind, and he's all right with that. Love brought him here, he supposes, if you think of things a certain way, but he doesn't believe that the Force has a plan for him, or anything like that, and he doesn't particularly _want_ to be here.

It's pleasure, sure: “People don't expect me to know _anything,”_ Luke confides when they're lying together under two layers of blankets, a rare luxury to have the night together, fucked-out and legitimately cozy and ready for sleep. “But I've tried lots of things, and there's a lot more I wanna try.” Luke is enthusiastic and demanding, and Bodhi sometimes has trouble keeping up. But it's nice to be desired, and he likes making Luke sigh and swear and reach for him, and lying in Luke's arms is like lying in the sun that doesn't shine here. “Why are you so warm?”

“Am I?” Luke frowns under Bodhi's fingertips. “Huh. I don't feel warm to me. I mean, you don't feel cold, or anything. I mean, I know you do feel cold, to you, but not to me. Isn't it weird how that same word--”

When Luke starts a sentence “Isn't it weird how” Bodhi knows by now to derail him. “It feels like heat is coming off your body,” he says.

“It's not bad, is it?”

“No,” Bodhi says fervently, “it's great for me,” and Luke laughs and kisses his collarbone. It's affection, then, although when they're not in bed Luke still asks annoying questions, which Bodhi thought might stop once they started having sex. Luke is cocky and brash, despite his squadron's _(Rogue_ Squadron's) assurances that he's a coolheaded leader. Luke has some kind of weird connection or antagonism or both going with the Princess and her pet smuggler that Bodhi can't bring himself to care about or understand.

But it must be affection, because when Luke goes missing in a blizzard, Bodhi can't concentrate on the manifest he's carefully falsifying as a prop for an upcoming mission. He picks things up and puts them down, fiddles with the ends of his hair, comes close to snapping his stylus right across. It's only natural to feel worried for the person who came inside him a few hours ago, fierce and urgent, hissing his name, and then changed tactics completely, stroking Bodhi's cock with one hand and his face with the other, watching him intently in the dim blue light. It's natural to worry about such a person even if he's irritating and demanding and manipulative--

The stylus snaps. Where did that come from? Luke isn't manipulative. He asks for what he wants right out, but never gives Bodhi a hard time for not providing it. If he's pouting, or happy, or frustrated, it's not a tactic; it's just what he's feeling, and thus showing. He's so open that Bodhi finds himself responding with sarcasm or suspicion, at least in his thoughts, and even though he knows that's not an inherently great quality in a person it feels good to be the one who's questioning, not just trusting.

Something very odd is going on in his head, but Luke's stumbling return in the smuggler's arms drives it out. Soon after comes the news that the base is discovered and it's all wings up. Bodhi's transport just manages to get clear, and when he makes it to the rendezvous, Luke's not there. Some mysterious solo mission, Bodhi gathers. Just as well. He had his moment of brightness, and now there's lots to be done.

 

*

 

Bodhi has liked Green Squadron ever since he piloted the carrier that put them in place to ambush an Imperial convoy. It was a longish run and they had to lurk behind a moon for a while to get in position, so he had plenty of time to listen, just listen to the conversation of people who knew each other well, worked well together, often saved each other.

It reminded him of being small and sitting in the courtyard while Rohini and her friends sharpened knives or picked through greens. He didn't understand everything they were saying, but the talk swirled and raged and rose and played and shifted and sank like the wind that blew around the walls of the city, churning the turbines and lifting the edges of people's robes and scarves.

So it's Shara that he turns to when the intel about the second Death Star comes in. Actually, that's not true. What happens when the intel about the second Death Star comes in is that he feels all the blood drain from his extremities, leaving him numb to the lips. “Put your head down,” his neighbor at the council table says, not someone he knows, someone with an accent like Adnan's (but Adnan died in a ground offensive only a few tendays ago), someone who understands how your body can betray you, can tell the truest truth about you.

But as soon as the briefing adjourns and he can move again, he finds Shara, waits for her to conclude the tense conversation she's having with Kes and for him to stomp off down the corridor, and says, “Help me get cleared for combat.”

“What?” Her face is drawn, her eyes huge and shadowed.

“What do I have to do to get cleared to fly in combat? Are there sims? Who should I talk to?”

“Who should you—Bodhi.” She shakes her head. “Back up. You want to fly in—oh. You want to be part of the strike. That's it, right?”

“I know it's different, but I can learn. Will you help me? At least tell me who to report to!”

“You know most of us are gonna be more or less a diversion,” she says. “You know most of us are probably gonna go down.” She and Kes have a son, Bodhi's heard, living with Kes's family in the Outer Rim. He says, “Shara, I shouldn't even be here. Do you understand? I shouldn't even be alive, but I _am_ here, and I couldn't face myself if--” He stops, hearing the echo, Cassian's voice in his voice.“If I don't do everything I can, _everything,_ it's like they died for no reason.”

He's shouting—he never shouts anymore—and she's staring at him. “Okay,” she says, finally. “I'll book you some time on the sims, you probably want to put in at least 10 hours before you even talk to the Admiral. _Not_ all at once. And if you meet me in C corridor at 0400 I'll take you over the A-Wing controls, but I don't even know if that's what you'd be flying, it's not like we've got a ton of spare craft. This is _really_ stupid.”

He does 18 hours straight on the sims.

When Ackbar grants his request, Bodhi knows for sure he's ion cannon fodder, knows that the Rebels are as desperate as they've ever been.

He practices until his hands are stiff and his eyes can't focus. They're more or less just waiting for their moment now, so his other responsibilities are few—what would he be doing, he wonders, if he wasn't doing this?--but eventually he can tell he's not learning anymore and makes his way to his quarters.

There's someone sitting on his bed, and he's so tired that by the time he realizes who it is, he's already starting to feel warmer.

Luke looks different. It hasn't even been all that long, but he looks older, graver, something. Maybe it's just that he's all in black? And his hair is different—worse. He says, “Come here,” and his voice is different too, calmer, but carrying that same old conviction that he _should_ get what he wants. Bodhi complies, moves closer, but he says, “Luke, I'm tired,” his voice sounding distant, like a bad copy of itself.

“Just lie back, then, I can do everything.”

Bodhi could say yes, and it would be easy, and it would feel good—he'd be in good hands. He has no questions about any of that. But--“No, I mean I don't want to, I don't think I can even—I don't want to.”

“Then we won't,” Luke says, letting him go, a little cool regret shading his tone. “I'll let you sleep, unless you want me to stay.”

He does and he doesn't, and he's too tired to sort it out, and he says, “You can stay.”

Luke moves over and Bodhi lies down, but as tired as he is, his mind won't turn off. He says to the ceiling, “Where'd you go?”

“To help get Han and Leia out of trouble, first. Then I went to see my old teacher. And to find out a few things.”

“Did you find them out?”

“Yeah, and now I have to decide what to do about them. You've been making decisions too, I hear.” Bodhi can't parse this and Luke seems to realize it because he says, “You're going up with the fleet.”

“That's right.”

He waits for Luke to say something like _But have you ever flown in combat,_ or even just _Are you sure,_ even that, not out of love, that doesn't matter, but just as a person.

Luke says, “Well, that's good. We need all the help we can get.”

Bodhi turns his head to look at Luke in profile, his face drawn into a kind of dutiful mask, a little noble, a little sad, and recognition hits him in the chest like the shockwave from a grenade. And underneath the thud of that feeling, he recognizes anger: a little glowing shard lodged in him, a warmth of his own.

When they begin the assault, when they learn that the shield's still up and fall back so as not to be slaughtered, when Bodhi slams his thumbs down on the triggers and misses and misses and dodges as best he can, he's trying to keep alive. And when the Death Star (the _second_ Death Star, there should never have been a second one, there should never have been a first one) crumples into smoke and flame and twisted metal and dead bodies, this time Bodhi thinks, _Fuck you, Galen Erso, fuck you for planning it, for building it, for not seeing it soon enough so that you had to get us to do your dirty work for you._

Just mathematically speaking this time, he shouldn't live, but he does.

 

*

 

By the time the New Republic Senate first convenes, Bodhi is long gone.

A few people are vaguely pleased by the fact that he fought against the Empire; no one asks questions beyond that. He takes cargo work for a mining conglomerate here, an agricultural combine there; there's nothing for him to do but work, and he saves enough to start a short-range freight company of his own, on Mimban, on a continent hot and dry enough that finally his bones start to feel warm again.

There's even a Jeddhai neighborhood in the city, second- and third-generation transplants with a sprinkling of people who fled the provinces after the Death Star demolished the city. When one family invites him home for dinner and he hears the cadence of their voices, Bodhi almost bursts into tears, and when he walks in and smells what they're cooking he really does cry. He gets his arm pinched by a woman so old and from a town so small that she has blue inkwork on the inside of her lower lip, which she stretches out to remind her son-in-law to respect her. To him she clucks, “So thin like a stick insect!” and fills his bowl again.

So he isn't lonely. He eats with them, and he hires their children. For other kinds of companionship, sentients of many species converge in the cool of the night, down by the spaceport, between the shipping containers, and people offer only what they're willing to give.

You can have it rough or you can have it calm, or anything in between. (You can't be a hundred percent certain of having it safe, but Bodhi''s never encountered anything he can't walk off, and the prophylactic injections at the free clinic are pretty good.) And there's a kindness to be found there, when he's panting and can't hold himself up and someone who just shot their load down his throat with a string of curses offers him a sip of water, when he can make someone's night by offering the corner of his shirt to wipe their face after they've attended to him for what feels like hours.

This is his life, _his,_ and it's okay for him to have it, because the Empire fell. His debts are paid. He hears things, of course, especially at dinner, from people who watch the holonews more than he does, or have relatives dispersed to other worlds. He's eating etbar and drinking sour beer with Doshdi's family when one of them says, “The Jedi, the last Jedi, you know he's disappeared?”

The Jeddhai diaspora are religious to varying degrees. There's a little temple in the neighborhood with a shard of kyber about as big as Bodhi's hand, and some of them go to pray and some of them don't, and some of them know the prayers and some of them don't. Bodhi never goes. He knows who the last Jedi is, but he sips his beer and tries to look like a distinctly lapsed man of faith with no personal interest in the topic.

“I saw that!” Uma says avidly. “He killed his students. All those Jedi go mad in the end, you know, too much of the Light or too much of the Dark.” Her brother holds up an admonishing hand, and she swats at it.

“He didn't kill his students,” Doshdi says. “You always stop watching too early, Uma. _One_ of his students killed the _rest_ of them.”

“That's not what I heard,” says a cousin whose name Bodhi doesn't know. “I heard--”

There's a river instead of wells, not far outside the city, and people here make their etbar with fresh fish. It never tastes quite right, lacks the sting of salt, but Bodhi always eats it anyway, relishing the other flavors. Tonight he barely tastes it.

Back in the rooms he's rented for years over the headstone-carver's, even though he could afford something better now, he waters the small desert plants he keeps in a row on the windowsill. They look like fat grey rocks, and they really aren't supposed to be indoors at all. About once a year they split open and put out a small greyish-white flower.

It's almost time to water them again when the First Order propaganda projections start appearing in the public parts of the city. They denounce the degeneracy of the Republic; they promise a return to a time of peace and prosperity. Some of them are subtly human-supremacist, others not so subtly. Once you get the hang of it, it isn't difficult to find where the projections are coming from and disable them, but someone's replacing them.

And then one day, he's in the office, going over the pension plan for a pilot who was injured on the job and trying to explain the process to Virek's youngest girl. She's young enough to still wear her hair in braids, but is clever with numbers and is supposed to be learning the business. The shutters are open—it's a pleasant winter day—and so he has a perfectly clear view of the quartet of stormtroopers as they walk by.

“Tata Bodhi,” Virek's youngest girl is saying, shaking his shoulder—he's never told them to call him “uncle”, never even heard an adult suggest it, but they all do it, all the ones her age and younger. “Tata, are you okay? Do you need me to get Ma? Can I do anything?”

 

*

 

She doesn't look the same, of course. He knows he doesn't either: his hairline has crept back, and there's gray in what's left, and the skin around his jaw is looser and the circles under his eyes darker. Her voice is deeper, harsher, but her eyes are the same. “What's this,” she says, taking the chip from his hand.

“The price of one very paying freight company.”

Leia Organa's face doesn't soften—that might not be possible anymore—but there's a slight crack in the rock of her expression. “I'm touched,” she says. “All for us, eh? What do you have left?”

“I have the ship I came here in,” a standard, anonymous salvaged transport, the only one he kept. “I can stay or I can leave.”

“What'll you do if you stay? We can't keep people with nothing to offer, and we can't afford people who don't know what they're good at.”

This time, Bodhi had time on the way in to anticipate this question, and to come up with an answer.

They give him a courtesy title of admiral—in deference to Scarif? To Endor, for all the good he did there?--but what he really does is coordinate defectors, recruits, and refugees. He doesn't do the initial debriefing—that's for the intelligence people, the ones who try to catch you in a lie. He's the one who tries to find out what they're good at, help them get acclimated, find a place for them in yet another under-resourced, understaffed, overstrained and overzealous band of fighters and the people who keep the fighters going. General Organa often complains that the process takes too long.

“If you don't like the way I do my job, take it away and give it to someone else.”

“You know I can't do that,” she says. “No one else could possibly do it as well as you do.” Besides—though she doesn't say this, he knows it—everyone else already has too much to do.

“General,” he says, settling back in his chair in an attempt to seem at ease that will never work—the springs were made for someone heavier and he has to apply pressure to maintain the correct angle--”the things you don't like about me are the same as the things you do like about me. They come from the same place.” _(The ruin of a city, a burning beach, the cold and the darkness._ ) “If you want people to do their best for you, even though they came here on the run and desperate, then you want people who understand what's happening and choose what to do about it. The people who do those things are the same people.”

“I make the speeches around here, Admiral,” she snaps, but it's not her real snap, the one that leaves you looking around for where your head rolled to.

They don't talk about her brother. They don't talk about her smuggler, or the son he vaguely remembers hearing they had, but who's nowhere in evidence. Kes and Shara's son, on the other hand, Bodhi sees all the time, usually in passing. He's large as life and twice as handsome, with Shara's eyes and Kes's grin. They've spoken, or at least they've heard each other speak, in briefings and such—Bodhi knows young Dameron left the Fleet and brought his squadron with him, which is fairly impressive—but Bodhi's never stopped him and said to him _Your parents were kind to me,_ which is all he can think of to say.

The Resistance engages when it must and gathers allies when it can. They scrape along, never fully destroyed, never making much progress. And then come the streaks of red light in the sky.

Bodhi Rook snaps his datapad in half when he hears.

 _Galen,_ he thinks that night in his quarters, unable to sleep, _how much did it matter? What you did, what I did? Would they have done it anyway, sooner or later, would someone—_ He tries to summon up the anger that sustained him once, but he's hollow, emptied out by all that death and waste.

Another briefing, another projection, another set of grave faces. Bodhi feels sick and unreal, trapped in a long echoing nightmare. The smuggler is back, adding to the sense that this is a distorted version of something Bodhi's lived before, will never stop living, will go round and round forever, without rest. Kes and Shara's boy is there, and someone else, a stranger, speaking, explaining what he knows about this weapon that's also a planet. He's magnetic, vivid: when he talks, the hush in the room changes. “Who is that?” Bodhi asks his neighbor quietly.

“His name's Finn,” Ollal clicks back. “Came here with Solo from Takodana. Defector. They say he was a stormtrooper, but that can't be right, everyone knows that stormtroopers--”

But Bodhi's turned his attention back to Finn, watches the way the room centers itself around him. _What will you do,_ he thinks, _what will you get_ them _to do, without even knowing you're doing it?_

But there's a difference. They've heard about the First Order's stormtrooper program from a few sources over the years. The Empire just offered people from conquered planets a way to survive, and they took it; Bodhi knows plenty about that. This is something else: the intel they've received has been from towns and villages robbed of children, armored figures who show no sign that they can even hear their victims' cries. If this man was really a stormtrooper, he shouldn't have been able to leave, much less give the kind of information he's providing now.

Yet here he stands. Bodhi wonders what it cost him.

 

*

 

Later, after the projection of Starkiller has been replaced with a map that hangs in the air, after that map too has winked out, after the girl Rey—another source of scorching heat—has left to follow it, Bodhi walks into the medbay. The overhead illumination's dimmed for sleep, and the cool lights that mark the way to the exits glow softly green. Bodhi knows that he should be thinking about the man who might be waiting at the end of that map, what the next days might bring, what the past has in store for the present.

But he sits by Finn's bed and watches the young man's chest rise and fall, breath even in what he heard the medics assuring young Dameron was a therapeutic coma, and he feels the warmth coming off him, steady as the sun.

It isn't hope that Bodhi feels. It certainly isn't love. But he wants to be here when Finn wakes up, so he can tell him he did the right thing.

 


End file.
